/tg/Station 13

In space station life, having maintenance access is a lifesaver. Sometimes literally. Expanding the amount of people who can interact in the dark and spooky maint areas seems fun. Plus, it removes one of the major incentives to play assistant for the access.

With the direction /tg/ has been taking these last few years, and especially most recently, assistants and cargo techs being the only non-engi/non-head jobs having maintenance access makes absolutely no sense. It can lead to awkward situations, like personnel being unable to escape their own department maintenance, which has zero reason to being a thing.

I think this would be a perfect time to implement a change like this.

Congratulations, you have stolen 50% of what I do as a hop. Perish the thought!

Honestly I'd like to see maint restricted further. I'd like it to be this spooky kinda unsafe area, but it's just become pathways for you to walk down.
Would be sad to see it made more open.

dumb. inconveniences and imperfections are a part of the game. they create a need for jobs and interesting situations when those jobs arent filled. whats the point of a chef if everyone can make a burger instantly with no downsides or costs? not even to mention the added difficulty antagonists would have now, since instead of just half the server being able to run in the instant they hear an odd noise its 100 percent of it. and ALSO not to mention that half of what makes a job is its access and by homogenizing access across all jobs youre just taking away the niche of assistant and engineer.

Can we instead make maps that are pleasant to navigate without maintenance access?

no, maintenance is for antagonists and the less people in it the better

if anything we should remove security's access to it (i'm pretty sure only the hos used to have it)

Agux909 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:54 am It can lead to awkward situations, like personnel being unable to escape their own department maintenance, which has zero reason to being a thing.

You can just add an unrestricted side to the airlock or give it the department's access. But don't they already have that?

cacogen wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 5:59 am no, maintenance is for antagonists and the less people in it the better

if anything we should remove security's access to it (i'm pretty sure only the hos used to have it)

Agux909 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:54 am It can lead to awkward situations, like personnel being unable to escape their own department maintenance, which has zero reason to being a thing.

You can just add an unrestricted side to the airlock or give it the department's access. But don't they already have that?

Meta does, at least last I checked, because it is good

Several maps do not - I love Delta, but it's the one that comes to mind when I think of this problem because I play Chef there a lot and their maintenance area is fucky wucky.

What if everyone got access to their departement maint instead ?

Well that's not a policy issue

Ideally the only people who should be in maintenance are security and engineers, let's not make this worse by throwing the station's maints wide open.

Ok but take it away from assistants too

Maintenance access is fine as is, I don't really see a need for anything to change. If you think you'll need maintenance access just ask for the access to be added in character

We're interested enough in this (and were before the thread came up) that we're going to trial it until April 15th and see what happens. We're going to be in contact with maptainers and whoever has feedback on it during and after the fact.

Personal comments:

Mothblocks - Not having maintenance access as a job like medical doctor/scientist/whatever is extremely unfun. You lose your ability to have any escape routes, especially as an antagonist. Furthermore, it is odd from a design perspective that we are giving any benefits to assistants at all, with maint access being a pretty huge one. Giving everyone maint access would help alleviate this, while, in my eyes, not being negative WRT power creep.
MrMelbert - Fine with a trial, but not in favor of it being a permanent change without further discussion
Timberpoes - 1 month trial, I want to see the gameplay implications of changing this.

By request, I'm unlocking this thread for a bit to let people better discuss the changes, though the config has been updated.

If we don't keep this station-wide, department members should gain access to their own department's maint, at least pathed to the main halls. I know it's a coding(mapping) issue, but it would alleviate the point about escape routes. Science on most stations already had this and I didn't even know other departments lacked it.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 6:49 amNot having maintenance access as a job like medical doctor/scientist/whatever is extremely unfun. You lose your ability to have any escape routes, especially as an antagonist. Furthermore, it is odd from a design perspective that we are giving any benefits to assistants at all, with maint access being a pretty huge one. Giving everyone maint access would help alleviate this, while, in my eyes, not being negative WRT power creep.

Can this be elaborated on? You mentioned "design perspective" so I'm curious what your design goal is here. What is the design benefit of everyone have an escape route without having to do the bare minimum of preparation in advance?
What is the design benefit of removing the noob role's isolated space where they can fuck around with simple game mechanics without disrupting other departments? The existing design (which especially applies if you are an antagonist, as you mentioned) is to either go to the HoP to talk your way into maint access (and potentially be marked as suspicious), or to steal one off of an assistant (either by looting a corpse/the morgue or just straight up mugging/killing them). This existing design is a lot more involved and creates a lot potentially interesting scenarios in my opinion, so I'd like to hear how your design philosophy improves on that.

cacogen wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 5:59 am no, maintenance is for antagonists and the less people in it the better

if anything we should remove security's access to it (i'm pretty sure only the hos used to have it)

Agux909 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 15, 2022 12:54 am It can lead to awkward situations, like personnel being unable to escape their own department maintenance, which has zero reason to being a thing.

You can just add an unrestricted side to the airlock or give it the department's access. But don't they already have that?

Actually just thinking over this, most people who sign on as jobs do tend to do those jobs and thus don't spend a huge ammount of time in maintenance generally, though it can be useful for navigation.

But of course the most impactful people to get maint access are the assistants who literally have nothing to do (or will do nothing) and running around maint and looting stuff is a common part of their game play.


I.e those most likely to disrupt the stuff going on in maint (and those most likely to be valid hunters) are those with access ; those who have jobs to do and probably only end up in maint because they need a crow bar / got trapped by a wall of fire / etc and actually have a home department to want to get back to / out of are the ones without access

I personally like this change a lot. I can now have a job I like without needing to A: play a job i dont like or B: Go to hop (if there is one) when I want maints access, I personally think this will make maints more spooky with more peeps running around in them. I personally don't like the idea of to get maints access to either roll it(Or play a job with no goals what so ever), ask for it or kill/steal for it. The ladder being kinda not being allowed if you aint an antag which pretty much leaves getting lucky or having a based hop just to play around in maints for a bit.

PKPenguin321 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:14 am What is the design benefit of everyone have an escape route without having to do the bare minimum of preparation in advance?

Mostly moreso that it's just been observably less fun in practice from my play, but if I had to put it into words, I like giving people more of a fighting chance, and our current maps only have this in the form of maintenance.

What is the design benefit of removing the noob role's isolated space where they can fuck around with simple game mechanics without disrupting other departments?

I'm not interested in removing assistant maint access, so I'm going to assume when you say "remove", you mean make it less isolated by letting more people in? This just feels like a stretch, I've spent an inordinate amount of time watching totally fresh players, and all the learning tends to happen off the arrivals shuttle, or when interacting with someone else and seeing what the game has to offer (which means I'd want them less isolated).

The existing design (which especially applies if you are an antagonist, as you mentioned) is to either go to the HoP to talk your way into maint access (and potentially be marked as suspicious), or to steal one off of an assistant (either by looting a corpse/the morgue or just straight up mugging/killing them). This existing design is a lot more involved and creates a lot potentially interesting scenarios in my opinion, so I'd like to hear how your design philosophy improves on that.

The HoP part is the strongest point against global maint access, I don't have a great counter argument to it. I'd be curious on seeing how often people go to the HoP before/after--a reasonable outcome to hope for would be slightly less (since some people just want maint, but hopefully other access are relevant enough).

This also ignores agent IDs which I think come with maint access by default? And are fairly cheap, especially since weapons are locked off until later.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 9:52 pm

PKPenguin321 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:14 am What is the design benefit of everyone have an escape route without having to do the bare minimum of preparation in advance?

Mostly moreso that it's just been observably less fun in practice from my play, but if I had to put it into words, I like giving people more of a fighting chance, and our current maps only have this in the form of maintenance.

Disposals?

Not a bad answer, honestly! I'll keep it in mind watching the test

One map that I really like this on is something like Tram, where you have some areas so disconnected from the rest of the station if you don't have maint access. For example, the library/chapel area has 3 public maint doors you need to go through to reach the engineering lobby. Without maint access, you need to go up the stairs, go through dorms, ride the tram to the central platform, and go down the stairs to end up in the engineering lobby. Everything feels much further away than it actually is, and it just isn't that enjoyable being that far out of the way from everything else.

One issue I would watch out for during the trial: People may end up using maint not as an escape route, but as a more convenient travel route. This doesn't sound like the intention. Maint may become less isolated and scary when it's crawling with every Tom, Dick, and Harry leaving work to grab a burger, making it a much worse place to hide than before. After all, who cares if there are no cameras if every inch of maint is being seen by your coworkers every couple of minutes?

The biggest problem I'll have with the trial is during cult and revolutionary rounds. Ive dabbed on revs because a majority of them didn't have maint access when attempting to kill me. I see cults being exposed faster and more often

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 6:49 am Mothblocks - Not having maintenance access as a job like medical doctor/scientist/whatever is extremely unfun. You lose your ability to have any escape routes, especially as an antagonist. Furthermore, it is odd from a design perspective that we are giving any benefits to assistants at all, with maint access being a pretty huge one. Giving everyone maint access would help alleviate this, while, in my eyes, not being negative WRT power creep.

I was under the impression that after you mentioned it to vire, him space and tattle started working on making department maint access less dumb, kinda in the same vein as what pandasenic was talking about.
S a bit cringe to do this while they're working on something related, especially because you're designing in their space. Would be uncomfortable if you weren't all maints. Not my beeswax I suppose.

On an unrelated note, I don't think maint access being useful/fun means everyone should have it. If the station's hell to navigate without it that's an issue with the station, not somethin that should just get covered up by giving it to everyone.
It also does end up making this area that we want to be sneaky well trafficked, since maint is typically setup as a faster/less populated way to travel. Seems kinda self defeating to the bit you mentioned about antags.

I guess the trouble with assistant maint is we've kinda built the area for scavenging and stuff, and it's become a reason for people to play assistant.
Just removing it doesn't make sense, kinda ruins a lot of what we've put in it. I guess as things are most of the people who maint crawl are either hunting antags, or scavenging.
Making it easy/hard to navigate/access depends on how easy you want those things to be.
Personally, I'd hope the jobs would have more engaging things to do, and I like the scenarios you're talking about, where someone needs to be inventive to escape, rather then slinking away into the door. IDK maybe I'm delusional.

iprice wrote: ↑Wed Mar 16, 2022 11:44 am I.e those most likely to disrupt the stuff going on in maint (and those most likely to be valid hunters) are those with access ; those who have jobs to do and probably only end up in maint because they need a crow bar / got trapped by a wall of fire / etc and actually have a home department to want to get back to / out of are the ones without access

The more people in maintenance the less useful it is to antagonists. It should be like a creepy deserted labyrinth full of stabbers (deep maints when?).

I don’t support removing it from assistants, though. It’s anti-fun and half their job is searching maintenance for cool shit.

S a bit cringe to do this while they're working on something related, especially because you're designing in their space. Would be uncomfortable if you weren't all maints.

For what it's worth, I did ping maptainers beforehand, and I got Vire telling me he was indifferent.

maintenance should be isolated and spooky. what's the point of dragging someone into maint to cut their face off if half the station's in maint to get to their areas faster?

I think maint should be more restricted not less.

Remove assistant maint access.

Maybe on the code side we could consider expanding departmental maint to be a little more forgiving so that people have better access in the maint right by their department, but I think maint should be mostly empty and it should be a little suspicious to see someone who isn't secoff/engi/paramedic running around in there.

TheFinalPotato wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 3:08 am I was under the impression that after you mentioned it to vire, him space and tattle started working on making department maint access less dumb, kinda in the same vein as what pandasenic was talking about.
S a bit cringe to do this while they're working on something related, especially because you're designing in their space. Would be uncomfortable if you weren't all maints. Not my beeswax I suppose.

On an unrelated note, I don't think maint access being useful/fun means everyone should have it. If the station's hell to navigate without it that's an issue with the station, not somethin that should just get covered up by giving it to everyone.
It also does end up making this area that we want to be sneaky well trafficked, since maint is typically setup as a faster/less populated way to travel. Seems kinda self defeating to the bit you mentioned about antags.

I guess the trouble with assistant maint is we've kinda built the area for scavenging and stuff, and it's become a reason for people to play assistant.
Just removing it doesn't make sense, kinda ruins a lot of what we've put in it. I guess as things are most of the people who maint crawl are either hunting antags, or scavenging.
Making it easy/hard to navigate/access depends on how easy you want those things to be.
Personally, I'd hope the jobs would have more engaging things to do, and I like the scenarios you're talking about, where someone needs to be inventive to escape, rather then slinking away into the door. IDK maybe I'm delusional.

My inner maintainer couldn't resist seeing how it played out in practice. We can bikeshed all day; I don't know if the players will like it, if it'll improve the game or make it worse, if it'll ruin antags or fill maint with so many people that you're just hiding in plain sight, an so on. I now have an entire month to see what actual impact it has. That's pretty cool!

It is very much an experiment to try alternative ways of approaching the game, its design, its balance and everything else. Being able to run this kind of experimental change is neat, because it frees us from that burden of "but what about if X happens" and lets us play it out in practice to see for real.

Mothblocks wrote: ↑Thu Mar 17, 2022 3:45 am

S a bit cringe to do this while they're working on something related, especially because you're designing in their space. Would be uncomfortable if you weren't all maints.

For what it's worth, I did ping maptainers beforehand, and I got Vire telling me he was indifferent.

Map edits are cringe. Add fire exit helpers that just add their department’s access to an airlock’s req_one_access.

Indicate these airlocks by using the unrestricted sides light overlay (useful in dark maintenance) with that department’s colour.

It’s kind of lame though. The station is supposed to be ill-conceived and run by a corporation that no longer even cares about profit.

This should solve for what we'd like to explore without needing to change config:
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/65530

I would personally rather see it more restricted by removing assistants maintenance access by default. They are the least trusted role on station yet have access to so many secret hidey holes. Playing assistant should be much more challenging than it currently is.

not having maint access is extremely irritating, this would be a good change

I kinda agree with the person earlier who said that we should restrict maint access instead. I like the idea of maints being this spooky place that only Security and Engineering (and antags) roam, instead of just "hey it's a slightly faster path to get where I'm going".

I'd caution against making maint access even more restricted than it already is. Just like I don't want maintenance to be as commonly traversed as the main hallways, I don't want maint to be a restricted area that's inherently antaggy to be seen in if you aren't a security officer or engineer.

All things considered I think a trial run like this is the best way to go about it. Universal maint access wont ruin the game, so trying it out for a month to see how it plays is a good choice.

Personally I think it's probably not the best idea, mainly since maints are supposed to feel isolated, but trying it out for a while should be interesting.

Farquaar wrote: ↑Fri Mar 18, 2022 2:47 am I'd caution against making maint access even more restricted than it already is. Just like I don't want maintenance to be as commonly traversed as the main hallways, I don't want maint to be a restricted area that's inherently antaggy to be seen in if you aren't a security officer or engineer.

I will always maintain that one of older Box's key features was maintenance made a very good set of shortcuts and allowed an antag to traverse nearly the entire station without being seen, save for quick dips into the central hallways, but everywhere was reasonably reachable without maint access.

I'm for this but for all of the wrong reasons.

I'm up for anything, by default, that disrupts assistant gameplay.

everyone should have maint access, it's how it was originally.

I had SVN revision 2 of /tg/station still around to verify this wasn't true.

I branched out into other roles now that everyone has maint. I love this change.

cacogen wrote: ↑Sun Mar 20, 2022 9:38 pm I had SVN revision 2 of /tg/station still around to verify this wasn't true.

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gooncode poster

It's never been any different for any of the /tg/station maps. Primary Tool Storage on BoxStation used to require maintenance access, so if anything it used to be more restrictive.

Since Mothblocks wandered into mapping-general and dropped this question on the mappers, there have been several discussions and PRs about access. Our current access is inconsistent across stations, handling access while mapping is agonizing and involves doing var-edits with access.dm open in another window. Tattle has done some very good work coming up with a mapping helper for door access, which has a nice side effect of allowing us to lint for a large number of potential access issues (once fully implemented).

Most relevant to this discussion is this PR: https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/65530

This revamps maintenance access slightly - -

• Common maintenance access doors are MAINT_ACCESS only. No snowflake access unless required to access a role-required room in maintenance. (i.e. direct route to abandoned bar has bar access)

• Common maintenance access doors are UNRESTRICTED on the way out.

• Transition doors inside maintenance are UNRESTRICTED

• Common Department Maintenance requires only generic department access

• Role-Specific Maintenance access requires Role-Specific Access

This generally comes down on the side of making maintenance more accessible to people without maint-specific access, and allows it to be used as a back door out of departments if needed. The big net changes here are that anyone may exit maintenance to a common area (but not into a different department), and that airlocks internal to maintenance are largely now public access.

As Mothblocks mentioned, I don't have very strong opinions on this topic, but I do see some positives with these changes. Inept has not had a chance to review this yet and make his opinions known.

Honestly I dislike that change, it appears that it leads to weirdness like being able to go from metastation robotics to engineering front door, halfway across the map, without stepping out of maintenance once, without maintenance access.

I also don't know why on earth the bartender should expect to have access to the maintenance abandoned bar? The point of it is for non-bartender staff to build their own bar, he already has one.

Not-Dorsidarf wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 12:00 pmI also don't know why on earth the bartender should expect to have access to the maintenance abandoned bar? The point of it is for non-bartender staff to build their own bar, he already has one.

That no-one but assistants/heads can then access

iprice wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 4:32 pm

Not-Dorsidarf wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 12:00 pmI also don't know why on earth the bartender should expect to have access to the maintenance abandoned bar? The point of it is for non-bartender staff to build their own bar, he already has one.

That no-one but assistants/heads can then access

What a shocker! Almost like grungy rooms full of knockoff equipment are kind of intended for assistants to paw over and make their own experience from!

This thread has lasted a week so I'm locking it now.